Games and the don't mix. As far as the silver screen is concerned they have a terrible reputation, with almost every single game that has ever been turned into a film having either failed spectacularly at the box office or received a serious mauling from the critics. Often both. There seems to be something about taking a video game character and transferring them onto celluloid which defeats the talents of all who have attempted it. While video games are still not well renowned for their in-depth character and innovative and intriguing plotlines, the consistency of indecency that exemplifies the game-to-movie genre is so strong that it begs for two questions to be asked. One: why do people still try, and two: will someone ever make a truly great film based on a video game?

The answer to question one is the easier of the two to come up with. You see, for all their myriad of faults; in acting, plotting, set design, pacing, character development, score, SFX and direction, there have been some game movies which have actually performed well at the box office. Some have done so well as to turn a respectable profit. So while no one in their right mind would say that either of the movies were anything grander than celluloid toilet paper (and they wouldn't be much good at that either, film being a very slippery substance) they did at least make some reasonable bank. The first R.E. film made $102 million worldwide, for costs of about $55 million (all figures from Box Office Mojo). Its sequel pulled in $130M for expenses of $70M. The biggest game-to-movie event was the first film. Surely one of the most iconic characters of all time, who was well know by people who had never played a game in their life, could inject the genre with a modicum of respectability. Financially it managed this with aplomb, bringing in $274M for a budget of $115M, not including marketing costs. Some of the reviews were favourable and even if for some strange reason you don't find Miss Jolie exceedingly attractive you had to admit that she nailed her character better than any other actor had managed in a similarly game-inspired project. While the money earned wasn't in the stratospheric level, it was high enough to get games types excited that maybe the long period of shame was over. The execrable Tomb Raider 2, with its minimal profits, around $25M, knocked their confidence for six.

The history of games at the movies is a surprisingly long one given the youthful age of the games industry. The first that took gaming to the silver screen was a forgotten 'gem' called The Wizard. Released way back in 1989 it wasn't actually a conversion of an actual game into a movie, rather it was a somewhat shameless attempt by to make some extra moolah off of the NES craze that was sweeping the at the time. Starring Fred Savage, the little tyke from the TV show The Wonder Years, the 'plot' revolved around Fred's attempt to get himself and two pals to the Video Game Armageddon in California, where they could use their potential winnings to gain independence from their messed up lives. The Wizard was chock full of games from Nintendo's catalogue of the time, with Rad Racer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a sneak preview of Super Brothers 3. Featuring such tat as the Power Glove, a ridiculous peripheral that could only have appeared in the late eighties, The Wizard probably ranks as the most shameless 90 minute advertisement masquerading as a movie in the history of cinema. It even made a respectable amount of money, grossing over $14M in the US alone.

Nintendo were obviously buoyed by the success of the film and no doubt inspired by the resulting boost in for the software and that featured in it. So they set about creating what would become a legend. Super Mario Brothers was the first live-action adaptation of a video game. Starring portly Bob Hoskins as Mario and a jobbing Dennis Hopper as King Koopa the film was a travesty of truly epic proportions. With a paper-thin plot concerning a princess rescue and a land populated by dinosaurs, Super Mario Brothers had none of the charm of the Nintendo games it took its 'inspiration' from and none of the qualities that usually go to make up a watchable movie. The film consequently tanked at the box office, with its very high (for the time), production costs of $50M somewhat eclipsing the $20M-odd it made at the US box office. Unsurprisingly, it fared little better around the rest of the world and it seemed like the game movie had been strangled at birth.

But that underestimates the paucity of originality that defines the Hollywood studio system. Even before Super Mario Brothers had begun its embarrassing run at the box office three other games were being turned into movies. Sensing that plumbers and princesses were not perhaps the best characters to introduce to a bewildered public, executives hit on the idea of combing an established movie genre, the martial arts movie, with a very popular gaming genre, the beat-em up. Both were very similar forms of entertainment, requiring little thought more than that required to enjoy seeing things get the crap kicked out of them. Surely this approach would pay dividends.

The first film into the ring was Double Dragon. A seminal beat-em up that had enjoyed great success in the arcades and on home systems, the film was unfathomably shite and bombed like the Blitz, taking in a derisory $2.5M at the US box office. Universal Studios must have been bricking it, as their film was up next in just a few short weeks. Fortunately for them they had invested in some 'star' power, with the likes of Jean Claude Van-Damme and Kylie surely being more responsible for its estimated $50M profit than the pathetically un-engaging movie itself. The similarities between the game and the film stretched no farther than the actors bearing a slight similarity to their game characters. But what could you expect from a game that had no story whatsoever and whose attraction lay in the special fighting moves, which the film didn't even attempt to recreate?

The makers of must have been rubbing their hand with glee after the Street Fighter numbers came in while running to the lavatory when they recalled Double Dragon. Against all the odds Mortal Kombat was a very successful film, in the financial sense that is. It raked in over $122M dollars worldwide and while we don't know its production costs we can assume that there were plenty of hookers and lines to go about in the executive boardrooms. It appeared that the curse of the videogame movie had been broken, and that the wafer thin plotting and characterisation of the typical Hollywood movie was well partnered with the video game, a medium which up to this point, didn't even ponder the notion of a storyline outside of the and adventure genres.